Sugar Glass

Abstract

Sugar Glass Brenna Womer (bio) He was a young man and a good man, but an odd man, most would say. And he'd loved another young man for 12 years. They'd been roommates their freshman year of college, assigned by the university. Our young man, he was not odd because he loved in silence, and he was not odd because he was an aspiring stage actor. He was odd, to most, because of his sugar-glass bottles, the bottles he made from sugar he melted and molded and set to dry. The little bottles he smashed with a hammer when they'd cooled to see how they might break; the ones he saved for no particular purpose but for something to exist in this world just for him. The young men were 30 now, and our young man, Dimitrie, was sure the other, Emin, loved him back even after all this time. Emin married a woman when he was 25, and they had a child. But Dimitrie waited. He hadn't loved another man or woman since the two of them had slept, night after aching night, on twin beds in their shared dorm room. They'd kept in touch. Dimitrie had gone to the wedding of his love and the woman he sometimes wished to be. Now, all these years later, Dimitrie was new to Chicago and looking for a break, was offered a job by his friend and his love Emin, taking care of his mother. Our young man moved into the old woman's basement, the old woman who was not old enough for dementia (but what does the body care of shoulds or shouldn'ts); the old woman who smiled often at Dimitrie but didn't mean it when she did; the old woman who could smell the love on our young man's skin for her own son who was weak-willed and too susceptible to love. And soon it was obvious that Emin was too much persuaded by our young man's long-steeped affection. Obvious when Emin stopped coming for afternoon tea with his mother and began, instead, attending nightly beers in her home with Dimitrie when he thought his mother would be already in bed. Obvious, the way he pretended to be fixing the faucet or adjusting the settings on her television when she came to the kitchen for a glass of water in her nightgown. Our young man had set up his sugar-bottle station in the kitchenette in the basement next to his bedroom. He had a small collection of shaped glass with which he was mildly satisfied. Enough so that he had resolved to offer them up as a gift to Emin on his birthday. Dimitrie had been invited to the celebratory dinner by the old woman, but he'd decided he would present his love the bottles—colored with spices and myriad petals and not yet perfect, but stable and enough—later that night, after the meal, when Emin made his late-night visit for cold [End Page 128] beer and talk of days when things were simple as skin and 200-thread-count. But the old woman made use of her time alone in her home while Dimitrie was away for auditions or his weekly improv classes. She'd been tracking his sugar-glasswork, and on the day of her son's 31st birthday she found the wrapped gift box and the card signed with love & longing by our young man on his bedside table. She took up the gift and brought it along to the restaurant, where Dimitrie would be coming straight from an audition for a play that burned of summer in the Deep South. She kept the gift under the table until the drinks were ordered, and then placed the box on the black-linen tablecloth. She did so without fanfare, simply left the package on the table and then reached for the pressed powder in her purse. Making a seat for the open compact in her palm, she dabbed at the corners of her dry mouth and glanced over the lip of the mirror, waiting. She was satisfied a few moments...